And let’s face it, it’s the American way. (Well, maybe not in Spokane Valley or Idaho.)
#Edwin l drake family free#
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling of a few years ago, I suspect I could operate with a free hand and pretty much buy whatever elections I wanted. I could endow shadowy organizations whose sole purpose would be to elect Inland Northwest candidates who do not annoy me. If I had piles of trust fund dough, how could I bend Spokane to my will? The recent death of billionaire David Koch, who poured money into all sorts of right-wing causes, made me wonder.
It has always been enough for me that Old Edwin did his part to save the whales, even if inadvertently.Īnd no, since you ask, I do not believe my extended family is personally responsible for global warming.īut I’ve been rethinking this inherited wealth business. So his descendants never had to worry that they would wind up spoiled and purposeless because of the initiative-killing curse of inherited wealth. We also mailed him a copy of a 1959 special section of the long-gone New York Herald Tribune celebrating the “Oil Century.”ĭrake was a decent engineer and had an impressive beard, but he was not much of a businessman. I used to have a sheet of those, but we sent them to my wife’s cousin, a petroleum something or other in Houston.
That first well was commemorated on a 4-cent postage stamp issued in 1959. But my father’s mother was a Drake, and her family lived near where Edwin did in Vermont for a time. I’m not exactly sure where the genealogical connection comes in. As I have noted a number of times over the years, a distant relative of mine drilled the first oil well.Įdwin Drake accomplished that feat on this date in 1859 near Titusville, Pennsylvania.
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